Cellular telephones provide individuals the ability to always be in communication with home or office even when traveling or commuting. Unfortunately, a person""s cellular telephone number is different from his office or home number, so that he may not necessarily receive all of the telephone calls made to him. The regular telephone (i.e., non-cellular telephone) at the user""s home or office typically includes a number of extensions for convenience and efficiency, enabling the user to go to different rooms in the office or home and still receive his calls, or permit someone else to answer the calls or screen the calls for the user. Therefore, the user typically de-activates his cellular telephone upon arrival at a particular location (home or office).
A typical problem of a one-man office is that the individual may need to give his clients or customers as many as two or three telephone numbers where he may be reached depending upon whether he is at home, at the office or in the car, for example. A customer or client may need to dial three different telephone numbers before reaching the individual. One feature designed to at least somewhat ameliorate this problem is call forwarding. However, call forwarding is not a real solution because it must be activated manually whenever the individual moves to another location and it must be deactivated manually when the individual returns. If the individual forgets to do this, he will be completely out of communication. Moreover, while in transit, the individual will receive no calls to the call-forwarded number until arriving at the call-forwarded location.
The same problems arise in any situation in which an individual has more than one location at which he must be reached at different times. For example, an individual may have a second home. More likely, an individual may have more than one office, each office having a different telephone number. This latter case may apply to an individual with his own business as well as a corporate employee who may need to work in different locations within a large office complex of the corporation.
An interface box links a user""s cellular telephone with all the standard telephone extensions at the user""s home or office. In this way, the portable cellular telephone is the interface between the user""s telephone extensions and the telephone company. The interface box connects to the cellular telephone""s access connector, for example, whenever the cellular telephone is laid in a cradle of the interface box. Through this connector is sent all power, signal and input/output connections. In addition to the interface circuitry, the interface box preferably recharges the cellular telephone""s battery.
Whenever the cellular telephone is thus connected to the interface box, each extension telephone at that location will act as though it were hard-wired to a normal telephone line. The extension telephones will look and act, to the user, just like the telephone system found in most homes or small offices, for example. The multiple extensions will all ring in response to an incoming call on the same telephone line.
With the invention, many locations frequented by the user (i.e., different private offices, different corporate offices, second homes, etc.) may be provided with such an interface box, so that as the user arrives at a given location he puts his cellular telephone into the interface box at that location, and upon departing he removes his cellular telephone from the interface box and takes it with him. Thus, the telephone extension system at each location is activated with the user""s cellular telephone number as long as the user is there and is inactivated upon his departure.